Narrator: How does a man become a legend? And how does that legend obscure the truth? In the early 1800s, during Napoleon’s reign, a courtier’s wife named Claire de Rémusat wrote affectionate letters about the Emperor. Yet after his fall from power, with her husband seeking a job from the newly restored monarchy, she burned her original notes. She then published memoirs describing Napoleon as a "monster incapable of generosity," a man with a "satanic smile." This dramatic shift from admiration to condemnation reveals a central problem in understanding one of history’s most monumental figures: the truth is buried under layers of propaganda, personal agendas, and self-serving myths.

In his masterful biography, Napoleon the Great, historian Andrew Roberts embarks on a quest to excavate the real man from the mountain of conflicting accounts. Roberts argues that to truly understand Napoleon, one must cut through the noise of biased memoirs and return to the primary sources. By drawing on the recent, complete publication of Napoleon’s 33,000 letters and visiting 53 of his 60 battlefields, Roberts presents a fresh, nuanced, and deeply compelling portrait of the man who reshaped Europe.

Narrator: Napoleon Bonaparte was not born into the heart of French power; he was forged on its periphery. His story begins in Corsica, a rugged island with a fierce sense of independence, only recently annexed by France. This origin made him a perpetual outsider. When his father secured him a place at the French military academy at Brienne, the young Napoleon was relentlessly teased for his Corsican accent, his less-than-aristocratic background, and his relative poverty. This sense of alienation, however, did not break him. Instead, it ignited a ferocious ambition.

He found solace and inspiration in books, devouring works on history and military strategy. He saw himself in the great men of the ancient world, later confiding that "the reading of history very soon made me feel that I was capable of achieving as much as the men who are placed in the highest ranks of our annals." His early writings reveal a young man grappling with a complex identity—a passionate Corsican nationalist who resented French rule, yet also an aspiring French officer who saw the military as his only path to glory. This internal conflict between his homeland and his ambition created a powerful, restless energy that would define his entire life. He was a man who belonged nowhere, and therefore felt he had to conquer everywhere.

Narrator: The French Revolution was the perfect storm, and Napoleon Bonaparte was the lightning it was waiting for. For a brilliant, ambitious, and ruthless young officer with no noble connections, the pre-revolutionary French army offered a slow, frustrating career path. But the Revolution shattered that old world. As aristocrats fled or were purged, a vacuum of command opened up, creating unprecedented opportunities for men of talent, regardless of their birth.

Napoleon embraced the Revolution not just for its Enlightenment ideals of reason and merit, but for the chaos it unleashed. He was a pragmatist who saw the shifting political tides as a current to be ridden. In 1792, while watching a mob storm the Tuileries Palace and humiliate King Louis XVI, his reaction was not one of revolutionary fervor, but of cold, tactical assessment. He famously remarked, "Why do they not sweep away four or five hundred of them with cannon? Then the rest would take themselves off very quickly." This statement reveals a man who disdained weakness and understood that power, ultimately, came from the decisive application of force. He aligned himself with the most extreme faction, the Jacobins, and even wrote a political pamphlet, Le Souper de Beaucaire, that established him as a politically reliable soldier. The Revolution needed men who were not afraid to be decisive, and Napoleon was more than willing to be that man.

Narrator: The Siege of Toulon in 1793 was the crucible where Napoleon’s potential was forged into recognized genius. The vital Mediterranean naval base had been handed over to the British by French royalists, a devastating blow to the Republic. The French army tasked with its recapture was disorganized and poorly led. Into this chaos stepped a 24-year-old artillery major named Napoleon Bonaparte.

While his superiors floundered, Napoleon’s sharp strategic mind immediately identified the key to victory. He saw that the city itself was not the primary target. The real prize was the harbor, which was dominated by a high promontory fortified by the British in a position they called Fort Mulgrave. Capture that height, he argued, and you could rain down cannonballs on the British fleet, forcing them to abandon the port. His plan was brilliant, but he faced immense resistance from incompetent commanders and a dire lack of resources.

Here, Napoleon’s relentless drive came to the fore. He bombarded the Committee of Public Safety in Paris with letters, demanding supplies with an almost manic intensity. "One can remain for twenty-four or if necessary thirty-six hours without eating," he wrote, "but one cannot remain three minutes without gunpowder." He established his own arsenal, trained new recruits, and led from the front, personally placing cannons and even getting wounded in the thigh by an enemy bayonet. When a competent general, Jacques Dugommier, was finally put in charge, he recognized the brilliance of Napoleon’s plan and unleashed him. In a ferocious, rain-swept night assault, Napoleon’s forces stormed and captured Fort Mulgrave. Just as he predicted, the British fleet evacuated the next day. For his pivotal role, Napoleon was promoted from major to brigadier-general. The victory at Toulon, he later said, "gave him confidence in himself." It also announced his arrival on the world stage.

Narrator: Andrew Roberts’s biography is not just a story of Napoleon; it is also a masterclass in historical detective work. The book’s introduction makes a powerful case that much of what we think we know about Napoleon comes from deeply unreliable sources. After his fall, a cottage industry of memoir-writing emerged, with many of his former associates rushing to publish their "tell-all" accounts. However, their motivations were rarely pure.

Roberts highlights several key examples. Louis-Antoine de Bourrienne, Napoleon’s former private secretary, was sacked twice for corruption and wrote his memoirs with a clear personal animosity, likely with the help of a fantasist ghostwriter. The Comte de Montholon, who accompanied Napoleon in his final exile, wrote his narrative twenty years after the fact with no notes, and it was ghostwritten by the novelist Alexandre Dumas. Perhaps most egregiously, the Duchess Laure d’Abrantès, who claimed to recall long, verbatim conversations with the Emperor, was a known opium addict writing her eighteen volumes to stave off creditors, with some sections penned by the famous novelist Balzac. These accounts were written for money, for political favor, or to settle old scores. Roberts argues that relying on them uncritically has created a distorted caricature of Napoleon. By returning to Napoleon’s own words in his vast correspondence, Roberts seeks to bypass the myth-makers and find the man himself.

Narrator: The single most important takeaway from Andrew Roberts's Napoleon the Great is that Napoleon was the ultimate product of both individual genius and historical circumstance. He possessed an extraordinary combination of intelligence, ambition, and an obsessive attention to detail, but it was the violent, chaotic, and meritocratic crucible of the French Revolution that provided the perfect stage for his talents. Without the Revolution, the brilliant Corsican outsider would likely have remained an obscure and frustrated artillery officer.

The book challenges us to move beyond the simplistic labels of "tyrant" or "savior" and appreciate the staggering complexity of a man who was at once an enlightened reformer and a ruthless despot, a devoted family man and an insatiable conqueror. It leaves us with a profound question about the nature of history itself: Are great events the result of unstoppable societal forces, or can a single, driven individual bend the arc of history to their will? In Napoleon’s case, the answer seems to be, impossibly, both.